


You Say Goodbye, And I'll Say Hello (There)

by ailcia



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Fix-It of Sorts, Fluff, Force Ghost(s), Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-02-23 02:56:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23004640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ailcia/pseuds/ailcia
Summary: No one is ever really gone. Forwards and backwards, our favourite Jedi work to cross the impossible distances their lives had led them.A post-RotS, Obi-Wan in the desert story with flashbacks and fond memories.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 21





	1. Chapter 1

In the howling silence of the sand-blasted dwelling, Qui-Gon watches.

He is just beyond being. An almost. He folds his hands, waiting for the word that their work can begin again. Waiting for the fog of grief and pain to clear just a little, just enough.

A few dozen rotations ago, a man had crashed into this wretched existence. Wild-eyed and sweating, as if having run an unknown distance. His face had been burnt blood red, his fair, ocean-born skin no match at all for the harsh suns and whipping wind. He’d lent back against the closed door with all his might and let out a moan of relief that caught in his throat and turned into a harsh, guttural cry that did not stop. Shaking hands pressed tightly to his face, he bowed forward as a bough under a storm.

His legs, when he found them again, had barely carried his weight to the bed. And there the man fell at once into a terrible fever that raged against his sanity, his soul slipping almost wholly under his sorrow. He’d screamed in pain and anguish, thrashed in dirty clothes against invisible foes and reached out to friends who were no longer there. He had wept brokenly, endlessly, becoming weaker with every passing hour.

Through it all, Qui-Gon had been helpless, trapped in his halfway state, thronging the very air with desperation. Yet perhaps that had been enough after all, a beacon in the darkness, for on the fourth day a tanned woman with sun-bleached hair and exhausted eyes opened the door and gasped.

Dropping her basket of thankful desert flowers and running to the heap on the bed, she had worked quickly to strip and to salve and to save. Though moisture was precious, she had bathed the broken man with water from her own sack, cooling his mind enough to quell the raving. He had coughed black soot into the rags she held to his mouth. After that, she had returned every day at the safe dawning of the second sun to press a canteen of water to cracked lips, lifting the heavy head with one strong hand. When she was done, she had stroked the still face, tracing wrinkles and scars alike with wondering fingers. Each day, too, she brought a small piece of food, a garment, utensil or bottle of something, piling them at the man’s unbooted feet, ready for the new, unwanted life that awaited him.

Slowly, painfully, the man had returned to himself. He quieted and slumped, muttering only now and then. The fever broke with every blessing and, seeing the signs of his approaching consciousness, she had gone, leaving behind a cloak darned free of blaster holes and burn marks, and a kiss of gentle benediction on his brow.

The first time Obi-Wan opened his eyes, his trembling hand had gone, confused, straight to his forehead. Qui-Gon had hoped he might remember the soft touch, that there was still some kindness, unsought, growing beyond reach.

But it was not to be.

A child of the Unifying Force, Obi-Wan had always been burdened by shifts of time and space. His visions had seen to it that he understood all too well the rise and fall of societies, the turn of wills that underpinned entire movements. His blue eyes had been prized for their clearness, for seeing far and expecting all, though never without the dream of change, for worlds made anew…

Now all his worlds, everything he had ever known, had come crashing down at once. He had been blindsided utterly. 

Qui-Gon knows better than most that this mind, lifted so to the fate of entire galaxies and always thinking thirty steps ahead in the attempt to plot the safest course towards the future, struggled to keep hold of the present. The potential enormity of each minute as it passed was often gone before Obi-Wan even noticed, let alone thought to clasp it to his chest. How often had Qui-Gon shaken his head with fond bemusement at his padawan’s wide-eyed incredulity at being betrayed, once again, by his former, all-too-firm understanding of the events around them.

‘Padawan…’ he would say, at a loss for anything to follow. Often, he would only reach out a hand to clasp his slim shoulder.

‘I know, I know,’ Obi-Wan would hang his copper head yet lean into his grip. ‘Next time, I’ll...’

Now he watches as Obi-Wan lies, unmoving, in the same position in which he awoke to this shocking new reality, crushed beneath the weight of it. He has been staring up, dead-eyed, at the clay ceiling for hours. Qui-Gon does not need their once-bond to know that his poor boy – no, no longer, he has aged decades since he last saw him – is pulling his mind into tatters, turning every shred of his life over and over to try and find the clues to the oncoming cataclysm, each one a confirmation of his guilt, his failure. Tallying it knowingly against a short lifetime full of regret and sadness. Never knowing how the Force sang in thanks for him every single day.

Never knowing how Qui-Gon did.

His Master has trodden this broken path of bitter self-recrimination. He’d felt that stifling black sadness pressing down on him from all sides, blinding him to the support he had had, all the helping hands he had turned from. It was only Obi-Wan and the steadfast light that shone from his soul that had saved him. Sometimes tremulous, sometimes terrible in intensity, almost from the moment he had barged his way into his Master's life, those golden rays had slowly illuminated every aspect of Qui-Gon’s life and rendered it anew, shot it through with precious metal. Mere words could not contain his thanks for that, for every sunlit moment they had shared. Every shadowed one, too.

Now, though, they share this awful bond. And where Qui-Gon had an entire Temple, give or take, at his back, Obi-Wan has nothing. Worse than nothing, he has been betrayed not by one but by multitudes. To have fought so hard for so long, in a war without end, and be denied the peace even of death…

Suddenly, it’s all too much. Suffocating. Obi-Wan takes a huge shuddering gasp and surges upwards, feet planting on the floor and hands bracing against his knees. A crashing spacecraft. His breathing is hard-fought, on the verge of panic. His filthy robes hang loose from his diminished frame, space for his chest to heave.

Dirty. Habitually fussy and always eager to please, Obi-Wan hates (Hated? Qui-Gon is no longer sure…) being dirty. It is inevitable in the desert and in sickness and in wherever they are now. His padawan’s misery is palpable, and all the worse for being encrusted with sand. Qui-Gon’s heart breaks anew for him. He wants, more than anything, to wrap his arms around him, as he once had, smiling downwards at the child hiding his face in his sleeves, a besotted barricade.

Thinking back, another thing he’d loved was brushing a thumb or finger over the mole under Obi-Wan’s right eye, the clearest star in the open sky of his young face. A silly little game long in the teeth, begun when his padawan was small and needed comforting, and never quite grown out of. It had always raised a smile, or as near to it as Obi-Wan could muster for him at the time.

Now, suddenly, he can’t help himself. He concentrates all his energies on that guiding star. With me. With me. It is a hard task, still requiring almost all of his power, but he knows he has struck his mark when Obi-Wan’s bowed head tilts upwards with a start, red-ridden eyes widening at once.

‘Master,’ he breathes, soft and beloved voice now raw and ragged. His teeth gleam beneath his beard as he opens his mouth in hope, eyes darting around the emptiness in front of him. Qui-Gon smiles (though he knows Obi-Wan can’t see him) and feels his lost heart fold over in his chest.

It is over so soon. The head bows again, an apology he owes to no one clogging his throat and choking him, forcing fresh tears fall, seemingly without end. Qui-Gon longs to smooth away the line that deepens so between his brows but knows he cannot. Not yet.

But he watches, and he waits. And one day, he hopes he will.


	2. Chapter 2

Obi-Wan reaches haphazardly for the second bottle of Corellian brandy and suffers a sudden sharp jab of memory. It’s his smirk as Qui-Gon orders Anakin to stay put on that last afternoon together in Naboo. Though charmed against his will by the child and his enthusiasm for all things Jedi – flattered, even – Obi-Wan remembers still his sharp appreciation of the telling off. He had, after all, been on the receiving end of that big, jabbing finger so many times over their shared years.

He had wanted to shout at Anakin in nasty triumph. See! Not all Caravellian roses and promises of adventure with his Master. Romantic and exciting, naturally, but hidden thorns and thankless work with it. He’d felt at the time that this was something the boy should have known, given their apparently immediate connection with one another. Obi-Wan’s knowledge of the strange, silent man he’d called Master had been hard won and easily lost, just like everything else.

He winces at the pain in his chest and the taste on his tongue. He can practically hear Qui-Gon’s disappointed sigh on the wind. But he cannot – will not – acknowledge it. He feels the heat of shame rising in his cheeks.

That had been Anakin’s last sight of Qui-Gon. Beyond the pyre. Who could possibly rejoice in such a moment?

He scrubs a rough hand down his face and breathes in long, seeking to dampen down his thoughts, his feelings. He stinks, the smell of grease and stale sweat and sorrow rubbed deep and inextricable into his skin, now. It’s too hot for a robe at this time of day, an afternoon of high heat stored in every last pore. A trickle of perspiration runs uncomfortably down his back, sending an incongruous chill up his spine.

He feels sick but reaches for the curved bottle once more. It’s the only thing he has, the only thing that can possibly settle him to an eternity on this hateful spit of rock. It allows him to feel and remember and qualify and release all his sorrow, all his new, hard anger. Not to the Force, just away. Far away. It also allows him to sleep – not meditate, how could he now. It had become a crutch during the first few horrible months where he had believed (wished?) that he would be blasted in the back whenever he closed his eyes. Or else run through with a red sabre and pinned like a prize pupafli to his bed. Many nights then he awoke with raging yellow eyes inches from his face and once (worse?) with dark blue ones, crinkled with concern.

He hadn’t slept for two weeks after that. Eventually his body, forsaken by the Force, had failed and he had collapsed near one of the market outposts, but not before hallucinating a golden-haired boy. Chasing after his dancing form, he’d run headfirst into a moisture tank, cracking his head open and earning himself a new moniker that had stuck hard. Negotiator no more.

He knows he should be happy to be so thoroughly, honourably humbled. After all, that’s what had gotten them into this mess. Arrogance. Ambivalence. Presumption.

Still. He can’t help but feel that these were all crimes that could have been corrected without the spilled blood of younglings, the breaking of the Temple foundations. 

The low light from the first sunset spreads like magma across his forearm, lighting it up as if it were vambrace. He thinks at once of Cody and forms an unconscious fist, all his scars standing to attention. Fighting down nausea he thumps the top of the table, making his scant clay pots jump and clatter. 

That stupid, stupid child.

‘I begged him,’ he speaks aloud for the first time in many rotations, voice harsh and high against his own ear, split into threads. ‘I begged him.’

He feels once more the caress on his cheek, but turns away from its tempting comfort. He wonders for how long he can keep it up.

He can’t bear it. Can’t bear to think this could be what his Master had believed in, what his Master had brought about. What he and they and all their friends – all gone now, as far as he knew, excepting his Great Grand-Master – had lived and breathed and defended and died for. What he, himself, had done. What Anakin…

There again, the sharp pain deep in his chest. He can almost hear Anakin’s lilted, non-Coruscanti ‘Mah-stur’ in his ear, the pronunciation so strange and once so dear. Pleading for another quarter in bed, for Obi-Wan’s leftovers, for an escape from the Council, for an agreed plan of redeployment… Usually accompanied by bright, rolling eyes, and a twitching smile. He misses him desperately, though he knows he does not deserve to.

His insides roil with the smell of roasting flesh, and he scrambles to vomit outside what you might generously call his front door. All liquid, near enough, and burning like fire.

Weakened, he rests with his face in the sand next to the mess he’s made, the last rays of the last sun beating down on the back of his quick-greying head.

He thinks then of Luke. So like his father in wit and as stubborn as the whole lineage (___ help him), yet as gentle as the newly rising moon. It had been over a year since he’d been permitted to see him in an official capacity, yet Obi-Wan knew he was growing into a fine and happy child. Luke remains the only glimmer of light in Obi-Wan’s dark life, tethering him to fond memories of the Creche, reminding him to place one foot in front of the other, all day and every day til the end of his time. He is the last hope for them all, and Obi-Wan knows he would die before letting his light be extinguished. Even if he had anything else to live for – beautiful Satine, even – he would.

Obi-Wan presses his hands into the sand beneath him and lifts his face from the dirt. Clutching the crumbling jamb, he pulls himself upright on shaking legs, then wipes his mouth on the back of his sleeve. He watches the second sun go down.

Something stirs in the rapidly cooling air around him, yet his eyes can find nothing on the desolate desert horizon, though he squints as hard as he can at it.

He thinks then of how his Master’s face – so grave and serious, as if carved from a cliff-face – used to break entirely open when he grinned. So unexpected, so cherished, so often in the face of his padawan’s complete bemusement. That grin, that laugh, had been a galaxy’s prize. Once, Obi-Wan had managed to make tears the size of boulders come tumbling from Qui-Gon’s eyes. He knows not how but suspects the worst… As a padawan he’d had an awful habit of playing up to the crowd.

‘Still do,’ he gives voice aloud to the unbidden thought, then wonders why.

Deep down, he knows. The stars turn beyond him, and the night sky is the same midnight blue as his beloved Master’s eyes. And he knows. It’s time. Enough.

Feeling some semblance of calm for the first time in years, he goes inside, leaning back against the closed door. He can feel the force of him standing close, and marvels at the warmth, at the sudden, strange feeling of safety. It’s like opening the door of a furnace.

‘I stand behind you,’ he swears to the empty room in front of him.

Somewhere, the Force laughs with sudden glee, and just like that he is free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. WHO KNEW this would happen so soon? More of an exorcism than anything else. Still, comments are very much loved. Thankyou! x


	3. Chapter 3

Qui-Gon watches over countless nights, gives as much of himself as he can spare to hope. Weak as it was, it is all they have. He works hard to bestow scant hours of peace in the waning hours, snatching them from the jaws of terror and those terrible fits of shakes and sweats. Anything to help his padawan heal (or, at least, attempt it).

Even when he succeeds, he mourns and marks the sleep lost. Obi-Wan had been a sprawl as long as Qui-Gon had known him. Compact and self-contained, yet with limbs seemingly too long for his small frame. A leg outstretched, an arm forever escaping from the confines of his cot, his couch or his latest cliff edge. Mouth open, abandoned to the stars, a snore at turns endearing and infuriating.

Now, Obi-Wan sleeps with a scowl, his arms crossed and shielding his heart, tucked away to almost nothing at all as if willing scanning eyes to pass over him. Qui-Gon knows this must be one of the costs of war, though he cannot know that for sure. 

His first knowledge had been reaching for Yoda through a blinding flare of devastation, booming across the universe and all its aeons. An awareness of all those Jedi lost in the same heartbeat flowing into the idea of his being, drawing him up through past and future, been and gone and never once more and soon again. A sudden flicker in the Force. His Grandmaster, head jerking suddenly up from where it had been bowed in thought, stretched out his mind on instinct and caught him before he disappeared.

Held together, entwined, he grew stronger and came to himself once more. Steeped in the ancient teachings, he had sought a way through to existence with all his heart. But the price of his passage was, it seemed, the fall of the Order. It had been willed, by the Force, by Yoda, and only then by himself.

As their energies flowed in harmony, his Grandmaster had revealed a little of before. The long path away from the Light, though fought in its name. Endless encounters with evil, the erosion of certainty, of all hope. A sandstorm blasting a small desert church, beating it into dust over passing years. Yet Qui-Gon knows so little still of Obi-Wan’s war. His hopes and fears for the day as it came, each tiny apocalypse of his life, insignificant in terms of the universe but so dear and so important to those who loved him. Had he been loved by his men, if not enough in the end? Qui-Gon desperately hopes so.

But it was lost to him. All he can do is take the boy he knew and work forward. Yet how can he?

He had been a wondrous and wayward thing: quicksilver tongue and a dancing eye, mercurial and difficult to manage at the best of times… And Gods knew Qui-Gon had made a misstep more than once, brought up hard against Obi-Wan’s inherently inscrutable nature, his infinite capacity to surprise and delight and, yes, sadden. His padawan had been all hard edges, unbendable to the point of haughty obstinance, yet at his core a seemingly endless supply of empathy and love. A confounding little thing, he may have been, but a being of the warmest gold mixed with a blue bright and true in the Force. Motivated only by the desire to help and heal that sang in his blood.

The man in front of him is a dark and distant echo all he had known and taken comfort in. The echo scowls up at him, or in his general direction, at least.

‘I know you’re there, you old goat. Give me a moment’s peace, will you.’

Obi-Wan’s voice is rough from scarce sleep. He pulls himself up into a sitting position with a rumbling groan, ever-lightening locks of hair falling into scrunched eyes. He rubs his beard as he comes to, moustache twitching. Qui-Gon doesn’t think he will ever get used to it. Nor the gruffness, so familiar yet so wrong.

Qui-Gon has a sudden vision of a past life, with a pale and shivering padawan wrapped up tight against a shuddering console in a tent-like cloak. His hurt was given away only by the short words and gritted teeth, his Master’s overlarge tunic sagging off his shoulders whenever he lifted his arm to try and help. He holds the vision close for a moment, drawing strength from it, and then lets it fade.

‘I’ll try,’ he answers truthfully.

He waits for Obi-Wan, slow and somewhat surly in the morning at his youthful best, to ready himself to face the day. Obi-Wan hauls himself from the bed and stumbles to the sink, resting himself against it to wash his face with half a precious handful of water. Qui-Gon quietly notes the scars that cover his back and arms, almost every inch of him marked with past sorrows. Though the galaxy forgets the Force will never.

Obi-Wan’s more like himself after his first mouthful of tea – a little of the tightness goes from the creases of his eyes, and Qui-Gon can sense a small break in the clouds of his mood, though his scowl barely lifts.

‘So,’ Obi-Wan leans back against the unit, holding the bowl in both hands and addressing the air in front of him, a wry look on his tired face. ‘Perhaps today will be the day.’

‘I hope so, padawan-mine.’

Obi-Wan sighs, drooping slightly. He truly expects defeat, Qui-Gon realises. Expects it every day for the rest of his life, yet still tries. Gods, how he loves him. The sheer will of him.

And perhaps it is this swell of love and belief that does the trick. Tea done, Obi-Wan settles himself under the window with his back against the wall and his legs crossed. He places his hands, palms up, on his knees, a gesture of submission and openness, wanting. He bows his head, and spends some moments watching the dust and sand, lifted by desert winds, dancing in the beams of bright light cast across the dirt floor. Then, with a soft sigh, he closes his eyes.

Qui-Gon feels him reach, almost reluctantly, for the Force. Just as tentative as he has been all these past few weeks, as if expecting a slap or sharp jolt of reproach in return. It is enough to break Qui-Gon’s heart.

He remembers dying, the shock and terrible, pulsing pain that kept his breath from his lungs. His last moments soothed only by a dim awareness of Obi-Wan’s sudden, blinding and perfect connection with the Force as he fought for their lives. He had been beautiful, burning gloriously with flawless effort, graceful sweeps and lunges and one powerful final blow. Qui-Gon had never been prouder than in that moment, and it had brought him great comfort to know with certainty that he would leave behind a Knight not only accomplished, but _magnificent_.

Now, though, Obi-Wan’s swirling devastation, the despair that churns around him, only push the Force further away. Qui-Gon laments the way it slips through scrabbling fingers, skittering away from them. They have been here before. He sees that familiar line between his eyebrows, senses the welling frustration, the rise of those old feelings of inadequacy. He fears the fear above all. Fears what it has already cost. The Force is rejecting him. He let everyone down. The weight of paths not taken, of chances lost, of lives ruined and lost.

Obi-Wan breathes out short and hard through his nose and lets out a quiet moan before catching himself. Another perceived failure. Qui-Gon feels a phantom tightness in his chest.

Drawing close, Qui-Gon kneels in front of his former student, closing his eyes to centre himself. He reaches out to brace Obi-Wan’s arms and mind, as if cupping his hands around a flickering, faltering flame. He concentrates first on warming the near-dead embers of their bond, blowing across them with strength and certainty, seeking to kindle hope. He draws upon his fond remembrances of their time together, the strange flashes that had passed before his eyes on Naboo, the feelings that had quickened in his slowing heart.

A polite tug at his sleeve before handing him a mug. A suspicious look while prodding at a bowl of home-made stew. The undignified, unimpressed snort outside the Council chamber. The grim set of his mouth when he was concentrating, curling inwards with a dogged determination that always made Qui-Gon chuckle when he saw it. Swimming together in a hidden moon lake, Obi-Wan as quick as an Anselmian minnow. Rosy cheeks in sun and snow and sickness and always, _always_ freckles. The weight of his nodding head on Qui-Gon’s shoulder in the dying hours of the day. The exhausted earthy smell after practice. Sudden, melodious laughter. Soft sobs in the night. A smooth braid gliding through rough fingertips. 

Obi-Wan flinches hard at the new flames, small though they are. Scorched by memories. Changing tact, Qui-Gon deftly banks the fire, protecting it and him. He feels himself now expanding in glowing waves. Desperate to soothe the weary whorls of Obi-Wan’s mind, this is new. He moves far beyond his former bonds, filling every inch of the space available with light and resounding promise. With a love shared and saving. A love he should have given more freely when he had the chance.

‘Padawan.’

There is a gasp and tightened fingers, starry eyes opening wide.

At last, he has been heard. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading. I know a bit more about where I'm going with this now, and am excited to write the rest. Please do let me know what you think!

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first Star Wars fic, so please do let me know what you think!
> 
> I'm @johnnyvod on tumblr, if you fancy.


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